Welcome! So, today's episode is gonna be about this battery backup.
Now, I know what you're thinking:
battery backups are not really all that exciting. I mean, you only get to use them, like,
once or twice a year, you know, when the power goes out so actually
I am going to be doing some modifications of this that I think
you're gonna find interesting and I'm also going to tell you
these aren't as expensive as you would think.
Now, this is actually a good battery backup.
This one actually uses a fairly substantial battery.
It's actually big enough to give you some decent runtime and this thing is also
very heavy indicating it has a real transformer inside of it.
A lot of the newer ones – the real cheap ones especially – just use
a switching type power supply inverter and it's… they're not very good;
they burn up; they get real hot.
OK, so, the first thing I had to do was disassemble the unit. That wasn't hard;
there are basically just two screws. Once the back came off,
I was able to sort of pry the sides apart. So, here's the inside
and one of the first things I wanted to do was remove this circuit board.
It's basically just a surge protector for the telephone lines but I don't have
any analog telephone lines anymore so this is useless for me,
so I just threw it in the trash.
OK, so, the next thing I wanted to do was cut a rectangular hole
so that I could mount a cool voltage readout.
I used a dremel for this as usual. This requires a very steady hand;
one wrong move or bump and you're really gonna mess up the plastic.
So there we have it: a crude hole. I used the file to clean it up a bit
and here's the final hole.
OK, so the next challenge was to mount one of these slide switches
and I want to mount it more or less right there.
I decided to sacrifice one of them by completely taking it apart.
Now, this will make things a lot easier as you'll see shortly.
So, after I figured out exactly where I wanted it to go,
I was able to use this piece as a template for the screw holes.
Once I was finished drilling the holes, I could mount the switch from behind,
kind of opposite of how it's intended to go
but this allowed me to perfectly cut out the rectangular part. I started by drilling two holes
and then I used a knife to carefully cut out the rest
and here's pretty much the final result. Now I can mount the other switch
that I didn't destroy from the back like it's meant to be
and you can see it works pretty well. I'll explain the purpose of the switch later
So, the next thing was to go ahead and mount that LED voltage meter
I was talking about. You can see the bezel snapped in nicely.
All I had to do next was mount the electronics part of it.
I decided to test the screen with an old battery I had laying around.
Looks like it works. Although it appears to flicker on camera, it does not do this in person.
OK, next order of business: I wanted to install a DC jack on the front
so I drilled a hole in the plastic.
Now, when drilling in plastic, I have found that it's always best to start
with a small bit and work up to a larger one.
If you start with the large bit you'll almost always end up damaging the plastic,
so I literally just go through all of my bits one of the time
until I get to the desired size; and so, there's my DC jack on the front.
Now I want to put two DC jacks on the back where those telephone lines used to be
but as you can see, this will be a challenge.
I decided to use a piece of aluminum so I traced out the size I needed and then
started drilling my holes. I use the same approach on aluminum as I do with plastic,
starting with a small bit and working up. If I owned a nice drill press
I could probably avoid this routine and just start with the correct sized bit.
OK, so there are my holes and you can see the jacks fit correctly.
Next it was time to cut the piece I needed off the bar. It's a little messy looking
but I can clean this up with a grinder.
OK, next it was time to mix up some epoxy. Once mixed, I applied it to the hole
and then I carefully pushed in my piece of aluminum.
I'll have to let this set up for a while so I'll come back to it.
OK, so I needed to tap into these DC wires which connect directly
to the battery. Since they don't have any slack left,
I decided to just remove some insulation around the wires to tap into them.
I needed to split it into four other places so I took four wires and wrapped them around
and then I soldered them all in. Also, I should be using red wire here
but I don't have any so I just use this white wire, so sue me.
Once I was done soldering, I wrap them with electrical tape and then
followed that up with some heat-shrink and that will add some extra layer of insulation.
Now, you might wonder why I took this approach, so I'll explain. I'm using 18 gauge wire
which will only support 16 amps so if I piggybacked all of the ports
like this from a single wire,
here's what would happen: if I pulled 16 amps from this one port,
all is good but if I also pull 16 amps from these other two ports then this wire
down here would be pulling 48 amps and it would surely melt
so by doing it this way it's much safer.
OK, so once my epoxy dried I was ready to install the two DC ports on the rear of the unit.
I soldered the wires in the usual way and then I followed them up
with some heat-shrink just to be on the safe side.
OK, all that was really left to do at this point was to reassemble everything
and of course put the battery back inside and I thought I'd give it
a quick test of the voltage display.
I also took this cigarette lighter splitter and chopped off
the male connector and used the two female connectors to create these two pigtails.
That will basically allow me to run any standard 12-volt accessories.
I can even use this USB charging device to charge any of my electronics.
OK, so, a lot of you guys are probably wondering:
what are the possible benefits of the modifications that I've done here?
Well, there are actually quite a few – probably more than I can enumerate
in this short video but I'm gonna go ahead and show you some of the main points. Now, the first thing
I'm going to do is go ahead and hook up the data port onto this unit
so that I could hook it into my computer and I can show you some interesting things.
Alright, so if you take a look at the estimated runtime, it actually shows
it's only going to run for 64 minutes.
Now if you'll notice, there's actually nothing plugged into this unit at the moment
so it's literally gonna only run 64 minutes even when it's not powering anything.
Let's talk about how battery backup actually works.
You have essentially these main parts. Now, normally the power flows directly
from the wall out the back of the unit like this
and also the battery charger is powered and periodically it comes on to keep the battery charged up.
Now, when the power fails, this relay opens and the AC inverter powers up
and starts providing power to the outlets. Now, let's talk about this situation.
Let's say you have a battery backup and you're wanting to power
something that runs off a 12-volt DC, such as
this 12-volt air compressor. Well, the power is coming from a 12-volt battery and then
it gets converted up to 120 volts AC. All of that happens inside the battery backup
but then you need a transformer to convert it back down
to 12 volts to run the compressor and there is an enormous waste of energy
happening in these two areas.
OK, so with these modifications I can bypass the inverter inside this thing
and I can run stuff on 12 volts a lot longer than I could using the inverter.
Now, one of the things I'm gonna be running on this on a regular basis is
this small, little ham radio that I'm gonna use as… it's a mobile unit but I'm gonna be
using it as a base station in my house and it's designed to run off 12 volts,
so I'm gonna be running it directly off of this and I'm actually going to be using this
even if the power is not out. In other words, this is actually going to be
my primary power source to run this and the 12-volt charger inside the unit is
actually going to keep the 12-volt battery powered up for me all the time
in order to run this radio when I want to run it.
Now, in the event that the power does actually go out, I can turn the unit off
and power this radio directly from these two ports I've added on here
and I could probably run this thing for a week straight – like constantly – vs 64 minutes.
Actually, it'd be less than that because I'd be drawing current, so probably like 45 minutes
that I could run it if I were trying to use the actual AC output ports on this thing.
Also, by my calculations if I wanted to charge my phone
off this little USB gizmo here, I could probably charge my phone up 12 or 13 times
– full complete charges – off of the DC port on this thing versus
if I were to try to use the power connector that came with the phone that plugs
into the AC power here, I could probably get… I'd be lucky to get one charge out of it.
Also, so I promised to explain why I put this little switch on here
and the reason is, is because this screen actually does draw a certain amount of power
and if the power were to go out
I wouldn't want this screen to be draining the battery down
even if it took a day or two to drain it down; that's power that's wasted
so I wanted to have the ability to turn the screen on and off,
for that very reason and for the same reason… I actually seriously considered
embedding some USB ports directly into this, and for the same reason I didn't do it,
because these actually contain very small DC-to-DC converters
and even if you have nothing plugged into them, they're consuming a small amount of power as well
and so I decided it would be best if it were external like this
so that, again,
I could unplug it in the event of an extended power outage and I would need… [this].
Also another fun little thing that I did is I just took this little LED array
that's actually meant for cars, that you can put in places
and I put a little barrel connector on it
and so I could run this little LED thing for probably a week or two
and this'll a light up a room pretty well so if you actually needed some light
in the room where you were working you could you can plug this little guy in.
So that was a kind of… another little neat thing that I did.
Alright, well, thank you guys for watching. I hope you found it interesting.
I wanted to make a few comments; you know, I probably get an email –
five or six day still asking me if… where you can buy a computer from me
and I just wanted to point out in case some of my subscribers are not aware of this yet:
I don't sell computers anymore. I haven't sold 'em in, like, three years
so just… just(!)…